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In case you didn't know, 2005 is the International Year of
Physics - and for good reason.

Exactly a century ago, a young German Jew, Albert Einstein,
working as a patent clerk in Zurich, Switzerland, wrote one of the
most revolutionary scientific papers. The theory espoused in the
paper, On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies, became popularly
known as special relativity theory.

"His was the work of a maverick, an outsider, a self-made man,"
playwright Ron Elisha said yesterday in a La Trobe University
lecture.

"His paper on special relativity, one of the most revolutionary
papers in all of physics, was written with an extraordinary
intellectual sweep and published without a single footnote. Within
the annals of physics, this was unprecedented."

Why, you may ask, is a playwright giving a physics lecture? Dr
Elisha, 53, has a scientific background - he is a doctor in
Caulfield South and writes in his spare time.

In 1982 he won an Australian Writers' Guild Award for his play
Einstein, which went on to tour Australia and the United States. It
played most recently three years ago in Townsville.

"1905 was an extraordinary year for physics," Dr Elisha said.
"It was very much a move into the modern era. It really is an
extraordinary theory . . . even after 100 years of intensive
research and investigation, it still holds sway - it still holds
water. We realise that it's not a perfect description of the
universe, but it's a piece of the puzzle, a layer of the
onion."

Thanks to relativity, the old Newtonian concept of space and
time being separate entities was discarded. There was not space and
time - just spacetime. And matter, Einstein showed, was just frozen
energy waiting to be liberated - an enormous amount of energy, as
the nuclear age demonstrated.

But, as Dr Elisha told the audience at Bundoora, while
astronomers, cosmologists and physicists are fully aware of
Einstein's insights into the nature of the universe, the lay person
is probably kept a little in the dark.

"Is it any wonder that Einstein occupies such an extraordinarily
exalted position in the world? The answer, of course, is yes.

"It is a wonder. Because, by and large, the people who make up
the world have absolutely no idea as to the actual nature of the
gift he has bestowed upon us."

With National Science Week running until Sunday, now may be the
ideal time to change all of that.